Books by Arturo Longoria

Monday, August 28, 2017

Several million people from Corpus Christi, Texas
to southwestern Louisiana are currently without power. The flooding
in the Houston area has reached “storm of the century” proportions. People
have lost their homes; and the remnants of Hurricane Harvey are still dumping
up to five-inches of rain an hour along the northeastern Texas Gulf Coast. Some
people are complaining that Houston authorities didn’t issue a mandatory
evacuation order prior to the storm. The extreme levels of naiveté
that generate those complaints are immeasurable. The Houston area
numbers about 6.5 million people. Even if residents had been told to
evacuate a week before the storm struck Rockport, Texas, the city of Houston
could not have been entirely vacated in time. I’ll take it a step
farther and say that an evacuation would’ve been a flop. It’s
plausible to suggest that more people might have been injured in an evacuation. Given
the general anarchy surrounding human behavior these days, the overall chaos
would’ve been horrific. Even so, the meteoric increase in population
has created a country crisscrossed with roads and highways and doted by cities
and towns. Yes I know there are still pockets of so-called “wilderness”
but look at a satellite photo taken at night and you’ll see that most of the US
is lit up like the glowing embers of a campfire. The population is
approaching 340 million people and it’s still sprouting like a weedy backyard. Our
prevailing American religion (even preachers, priests and rabbis worship at its
alter) is the acquisition of money; and behind that religion is a doctrine that
says we must have unbridled growth and development—something akin to a metastasizing malignant
tumor. So the night skies continue to flame while once silent and
quiet places become the true endangered species in this country.

Along comes a few who don’t hanker to live in the crowded
milieu and who have grown tired of a dysfunctional government and of Capitalism’s
endless quest to cheapen quality from all corners. They seek to maintain a low profile hoping
not to be noticed. Some go completely
“off grid” while others connect to a nearby power line as a temporary
convenience. All the while, The System fights to thwart the
independently minded. Identity politics
pervades all sides of the political spectrum and individualism is frowned
upon. Independence is viewed as odd and
eccentric. Singularity has become a
pariah. Look up synonyms for singularity: aberration, abnormality,
anomaly, caprice, capriciousness, foible, freakishness. Conformity rules now more than ever; and the majority (like
lemmings scurrying off a cliff) blindly follow the mono-dimensional choices
presented to us by The Establishment—the
Corporatist Oligarchy.

A close friend told me the other night that he feared America
is approaching some sort of point of no return (my words, not his) and that
widespread violence and disorder are not far away. I told him it’s been an insidious process and
that Americans have, for the most part, become desensitized to what’s going on
all around them. Think of it as the
prodromal stage of a dangerous infectious disease. One feels poorly—tired, malaise, headachy,
nauseous. And then seemingly overnight
the infection breaks out, overwhelms the immune system and the body collapses
in illness.

I suggest that the schism in the country today is not so much
between differing political factions as it is between the vast majority of
urbanites and those few rural folks who prefer being left alone. By the way, AM Talk Radio, infamous for
creating hate-filled dissentions, is entirely manned by people who reflect
urban lifestyles.

Lest you think I’m attempting to denigrate urban and suburban ideologies let me make it clear that I think people should be allowed to live as
they want as long as they don’t destroy property, pollute water resources, foul
the air or don’t attempt to tell one group of people how to live as a means of
controlling them. People are prone to
over-interpret a statement like that so let me add that we don’t have the right
to annihilate The People’s Land, and we don’t
have the right to poison ground water or surface water. We also don’t have the right to pump toxins
into the air. One more thing: No one has
the right to decide that they’re going to build a road or fence across someone
else’s property while claiming eminent domain. I think many people have concluded that when private corporations or the government or
an autocratic President decide to mess up people’s lives then the people have a
right to retaliate. In my opinion that’s
a dangerous place to push people, but I hear that opinion from too many areas
these days. Just last night as I sat by
a campfire in a thickly wooded area with a neighbor I was told that a group of
urban politicians want to make a paved road right through private land. My neighbor was livid. “Who do these damn city *&%#*@%’s think
they are?” my neighbor asked. I could
provide no clear answer….Which in a roundabout way brings me back to
Houston, Texas. Complete chaos at the moment. Fortunately, there are other places willing
to lend a helping hand. But what if what
we’re seeing in Houston was countrywide?
What if there was nobody to help?
No medicines, no rescuers, no FEMA, no aid of any kind. Is that an outrageous and impossible thought? Perhaps not.